And as Clotilda listened, she wished that she could
turn this brave young chief away from his heathen deities, Thor
and Odin, to the worship of the Christians' God; and, revolving
strange fancies in her mind, she determined what she would do
when she "grew up,"--as many a girl since her day has determined.
But even as they reached the fair city of Geneva--then half
Roman, half Gallic, in its buildings and its life--the wonderful
news met them how this boy-king Clovis, sending a challenge to
combat to the prefect Syagrius, the last of the Roman governors,
had defeated him in a battle at Soissons, and broken forever the
power of Rome in Gaul.
War, which is never any thing but terrible, was doubly so in
those savage days, and the plunder of the captured cities and
homesteads was the chief return for which the barbarian soldiers
followed their leaders. But when the Princess Clotilda heard how,
even in the midst of his burning and plundering, the young
Frankish chief spared some of the fairest Christian churches, he
became still more her hero; and again the desire to convert him
from paganism and to revenge her father's murder took shape in
her mind.
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